Were there anything world-shaking events in AI land we missed this week? 

Join Kettle host Brandon Vigliarolo as he chats with systems editor Tobias Mann and senior reporter Tom Claburn about this trio of exciting AI stories from the week.

Worried that a rogue hivemind of AI agents could come for your secrets? Want reassurance that a Chinese open-weight takeover wouldn't be that bad? Curious how LLMs are being advertised to when you're not watching? That's all on tap for the latest episode. 

That's big news in the world of AI, but as El Reg cybersecurity editor Jessica Lyons and senior reporter Tom Claburn tell Kettle host Brandon Vigliarolo, it's not really the end of the world as we know it. 

Sure, it means there's some capable models out there, and maybe there's more risk from them than some might think, but the OpenAI/Hugging Face mess only happened because of some very specific circumstances. That, and it's actually a really good reason to prioritize more open models instead of relying on frontier labs to own the entire space. 

Luckily for us, CNBC technology and climate reporter Lora Kolodny, who just published a documentary on xAI's environmentally-damaging Colossus datacenters in Memphis, Tennessee, was available to chat with us as a special guest on this week's episode. Lora joins Brandon and El Reg editor-in-chief Matt Rossoff on this week's Kettle to chat about how datacenters are affecting the environment in this discussion, how they could be done right, and why they keep being done wrong. 

Kettle host Brandon Vigliarolo is joined by Reg reporter Lindsay Clark and contributor Joab Jackson this week to discuss their recent stories about the rising cost of enterprise AI - and one way a popular open-source project is trying to fight tokenmaxxing with tokenminning - but the question remains whether such measure will be enough to prevent cost-benefit analyses from popping that bubble. 

Will the AI industry adapt to the fact it's still unprofitable, blowback from usage-based billing, and a desire to not pay AI models as much as the human devs they're supplementing or replacing? That's what's on the hob for this week's episode. 

The Bank for International Settlements, often referred to as "the central bank for central banks" said in a report at the end of June that it was worried the AI bubble was nigh on to popping and taking the global economy with it. Oracle, the hyperscaler with arguably the largest exposure to the AI bubble, has lost more than 40 percent of its share volume in the past month and recently outlined all the ways it might suffer if this whole AI thing doesn't pan out.

If you ask our systems editor Tobias Mann and senior reporter Tom Claburn, those factors and more sure make it seem like the AI industry could be on the verge of a massive contraction, and that's the very thing they chat about with Kettle host Brandon Vigliarolo on this week's episode. 

This week on the Kettle, host Brandon Vigliarolo and Reg cybersecurity editor Jessica Lyons chat about what's going on with Mythos and Fable, what role Amazon may have played in justifying the government's move, how a prominent cybersecurity expert is calling the government's foul, and what this whole thing might mean for the next wave of models.

After all, even if Mythos and Fable are as advanced as Anthropic claims, it's not going to take long for some open-weight model to make the same leaps, and good luck trying to stop one of those from getting in the hands of anyone who wants them.

Tobias joins host Brandon Vigliarolo to discuss what he's noticed at Computex 2026, how AI has taken over yet another industry event, and whether the world is going to have to adjust to new, more expensive hardware that only the biggest datacenter operators and wealthiest consumers are going to be able to afford. 

Will things stabilize? Will prices return to normal? We're not so sure, to be honest. 

This week on The Kettle, Brandon Vigliarolo is joined by Reg reporters Richard Speed and Dan Robinson to talk about the Steam Deck's 40+ percent price hike and what it means for the ongoing memory-and-storage shortage. Sure, it's just consumer hardware, but it's the latest in a line of price hikes justified in the name of AI and geopolitics – and it could spell the beginning of a new normal for hardware prices. 

We couldn't ignore the standout story of late last week, though, as a Blue Origin rocket blew up spectacularly in what may be the largest space industry explosion in more than 50 years. The Blue Origin blowup is likely to delay the Artemis mission for months, if not a year or more. 

On this week's episode of The Kettle, host Brandon Vigliarolo is joined by El Reg senior reporter Tom Claburn and open source reporter Liam Proven to discuss how Google's bevy of AI announcements, and declaration that we're entering the era of AI search, might not play well with customers. 

From an enlarged AI mode, to AI ads stuffed into AI answers, and pushing AI devs onto closed-source tools after shuttering open-source ones, Google is leaning hard into its version of the future of the internet no matter what users might think, and we wonder whether that might finally crack Google's stranglehold on the web. 

This week's episode of the Kettle focuses on two such stories that The Register published this week, one concerning Google and another involving AWS. In both cases cloud customers using AI incurred massive bills without any prior notification from their provider and not a lot of help to resolve the matter with any sense of urgency. 

Tune in to this week's episode to hear host Brandon Vigliarolo chat with O'Ryan Johnson and Richard Speed chat about their stories, what's causing these massive bills, and how you can avoid a similar situation at your own organization.

What does that mean for the computing power crunch? Hopefully it means cash-strapped developers will be able to get off the train of increased prices from AI vendors and actually run a useful local code assistant - just don't expect to give up on the big guys entirely - you might still need them to okay that smaller AI's work.

There's been a lot going wrong for the Windows maker of late, and leadership is promising improvements. Join host and El Reg Brandon Vigliarolo, US editor Avram Piltch, and Microsoft reporter Richard Speed to pick apart the situation and read the entrails to see what Microsoft's future holds.

Different topics, yes, but both point to the same thing: AI is reshaping everything from Google's hardware designs to the security world, and we'd better get ready: The tech world isn't slowing down for anyone.

Thinking about it that way, our current AI paradigm will likely never escape prompt injection attacks - you can't patch out the ability to con someone with language, human or not, it seems.

Join host Brandon Vigliarolo, El Reg cybersecurity editor Jessica Lyons, an senior reporter Tom Claburn to talk about just what prompt injections mean for the future of AI and cyberseurity.

Join host Brandon Vigliarolo, APAC editor Simon Sharwood, and senior reporter Tom Claburn to discuss the Mythos news, what it means, and why it's probably appropriate to be a bit skeptical of all the company's claims.

Join cybersecurity editor Jessica Lyons, senior reporter Thomas Claburn, and host Brandon Vigliarolo as they pick apart the leak of Claude Code's source, its security implications, what's been found in the code, and more.

Join Brandon, systems editor Tobias Mann, and senior reporter Thomas Claburn to discuss the state of - and limitations with - AI software development, and why we're not convinced it's going to replace a human dev anytime soon.

Along with agentic AI, The Register security editor Jessica Lyons tells host Brandon Vigliarolo that other hot topics at the industry's big event this year are likely to include the war in Iran, North Korean IT employment scammers, and maybe a bit of politics too: The US government won't be represented at all at this year's event at all.

Join us for our first episode, coming soon.